Jérôme Dokic

Situated minimalism versus free enrichment

In this paper, we put forward a position we call “situationalism” (or “situated minimalism”), which is a middle-ground view between minimalism and contextualism in recent philosophy of language. We focus on the notion of free enrichment, which first arose within contextualism as underlying the claim that what is said is typically enriched relative to the logical form of the uttered sentence. However, minimalism also acknowledges some process of pragmatic intrusion in its claim that what is thought and communicated is typically enriched relative to what is said. We show that situationalism dispenses with free enrichment both at the level of what is said (proposition expressed) and of what is thought (mental level). According to situationalism, an alleged underdetermined utterance can, pace minimalism, be true in one situation while false in another, and two people using the same alleged underdetermined sentence can be characterized, pace contextualism, as having said the same thing.

Une théorie réflexive du souvenir épisodique

This paper deals with the distinction between factual and episodic memory (memory that p vs. memory of particular x). The following theses are defended, (i) Episodic memory is internally related to a particular past experience. (ii) Factual memory about x does not imply episodic memory ofx. (iii) Episodic and factual memory may carry the same kind of information about the past. Finally, (iv) episodic memories are reflexive factual memories. When I remember x in the episodic sense, I have a collection of factual memories not only about x, but equally and simultaneously about the fact that this same collection comes directly from my past experience.

The dynamics of deictic thoughts

Etude de la dynamique cognitive des pensees deictiques, cest-a-dire des pensees utilisant des termes indexicaux tels que ceci, cela, fondes sur la perception. Soulevant le probleme de lindividuation et de la continuite des pensees dans le temps, lA. formule les principes dune theorie adequate de la dynamique cognitive en reference a D. Kaplan, G. Evans et C. Peacocke

ON THE COGNITIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF INDEXICALS

Linguistic ....... Cognitive ....... Mental Meaning Significance States (ii) Wettstein (1986) questioned the first relation in this schema, i.e. he tried to show that linguistic meaning cannot fully determine cognitive significance (or value); (iii) it could be thought, on the basis of Perry (1988), that a slight modification of the first relation suffices to reply to Wettsteins objection; (iv) however, we shall show that this suggestion may actually threaten the second relation, between cognitive signifi- cance and mental states; (v) we propose the outline of an answer to Wettsteins concern, which fits into the original schema as a whole.

Knowledge, perception, and the art of camouflage

I present a novel argument against the epistemic conception of perception (ECP) according to which perception either is a form of knowledge or puts the subject in a position to gain knowledge about what is perceived. ECP closes the gap between a perceptual experience that veridically presents a given state of affairs and an experience capable of yielding the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains. Against ECP, I describe a particular case of perceptual experience in which the following triad of claims is true: (i) The experience presents a given state of affairs (it has propositional content); (ii) The experience is veridical; (iii) The experience cannot yield the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains (even in the absence of relevant defeaters). This case involves an empirically well-studied phenomenon, namely perceptual hysteresis, which involves the maintenance of a perceptual experience with a relatively stable content over progressively degrading sensory stimulations.